Riding Fury Home

by Chana Wilson

  I was bursting with excitement to see Gloria, but a bit dizzy from the previous week’s adventures. I’d slept with Emily for the first time, but it hadn’t gone that well. I’d actually fallen asleep in the middle of having sex with her. I blamed it on the fact that I was exhausted from my predawn shift working as an engineer at a San Francisco television station, but it seemed a bad omen.

  The next day, I’d gone on a camping trip with my friend Dee. I was friends with her lover Julie, but when Dee began to stroke my back as we sat staring at the full moon over the Russian River, I let myself slip into the reassuring thought that they were on the verge of breaking up. Back in the tent, we made love. This was new—for me to be the one with multiple lovers.

  Now, I was flying with the thrill of being desired by two women. It gave me a sense of power. I’d slept with Emily on Thursday, and with Dee on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Gloria arrived on Monday. I ran to hug her as she came out of the jetway with her tabby, Sean, in a carrying case. We drove to my apartment, piled her things in the living room, and watched Sean sniff around his new environment. “Let’s eat; you must be starved,” I said. “I’ll make you something you’ve never had.” I got out the bag of tortillas.

  In between flipping the tortillas in the frying pan, I gesticulated with the spatula, telling her about my romantic adventures. Gloria was sitting at my yellow Formica kitchen table. Her head was cocked to the side, and her shoulders bounced to the rhythm of her chuckling. It was a look that made me feel adored, that she took delight in my screwy life. I grinned proudly as I set our plates laden with tortillas, refried beans, avocado, tomato, and salsa onto the table. Gloria dug in, always game for something new.

  BY FALL, I WAS DOWN to one lover. The high of being desired had turned into the strain of juggling. I’d made a mess of it, keeping each lover a secret from the other for too long, until circumstances pushed me into telling. One night, Emily and I went to a concert at La Peña, a leftist Latin American community center. We were sitting in the audience before the house had quieted, when I heard a hiss behind me. It grew louder. What the hell? I turned around to face—oh God, Julie—Dee’s longtime girlfriend, whom Dee was in the midst of breaking up with in part because of me. Between clenched teeth, Julie spat, “How could you—a Jewish woman—do such a thing to me, another Jew? Shame, shame on you!” I blanched and turned back around, stiff with guilt. I knew I had done her wrong when I slept with Dee; she’d been my friend, too, after all, although I didn’t agree with the Jewish part. What did clan loyalties have to do with this? Emily leaned over and whispered, “What the hell was that about?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I whispered back.

  Neither girlfriend was happy, and I knew I had to choose. For a few weeks, I waffled. Weighing things rationally, it seemed I had more commonality with Emily, a middle-class, politically active Jewish woman, but I kept feeling sleepy around her. Bored, really. And my mother’s comments about Emily—“That woman talks a lot. I mean, she doesn’t listen”—had stuck with me and given me pause. And it wasn’t simply Dee’s difference as a working-class, butch, Catholic girl that intrigued me. There was something exciting in how she admired me, touched me, wanted me, and something intangible beyond that. That intangibility should have been a red flag, but I went with its pull, my Taurean bull head down, charging after my matador.

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T JUST move to my city, she moved onto my block, three houses away. It was my doing. She had asked me to find her an apartment to rent, so when I noticed that a place was open on my block, I figured it would be a good starter apartment. Then I started to worry about my mother’s need of me, how she wouldn’t have any local friends and might cling. I started to panic: My God, what have I done?

  What I didn’t consciously acknowledge was my need of my mother. But I soon found myself leaning into her. After a decade apart, our new routine became daily visits, popping back and forth between apartments. With her on the block, I stopped spending as much time with friends, and withdrew into the ease of hanging out with my mother.

  She cooked me meals, which I ate with relish. Since the strict vegetarian days of my early twenties, I’d started eating chicken and fish again. Gloria reintroduced me to a forbidden delight: thick, juicy, bloody steak. I didn’t tell my friends that she grilled me huge T-bones, served with a baked potato slathered with butter, chives, and sour cream. Our secret, carnivorous gluttony. This was food from my childhood. I even reverted to ketchup, pounding an upended Heinz bottle with the heel of my hand, listening for the glug of the red blob dropping onto my plate, mixing with the steak blood.

  Gloria was more resilient than I’d imagined. She had given up a full-time therapy practice in Manhattan, but not long after her arrival, she began volunteering as a therapist at San Francisco’s gay counseling center, Operation Concern. The staff gave her referrals, and within a year she established a practice. She made friends close to her age by joining an older lesbian organization. She found like-minded women, spiritual seekers who got together to listen to Ram Dass tapes and meditate. Soon, I was hanging out with her friends as well as my own.

  I saw more of my mother than I did of Dee. Dee worked the night shift delivering the San Francisco Chronicle to newsstands around the city—a job for which she carried a handgun—and took classes at San Francisco State during the day. We got together mostly on the weekends, which kept our time together datelike for the first year of our relationship.

  In our second year, Dee asked if I would live with her. I hesitated, uncertain. I had never lived with a lover since so long ago with Kate. I’d lived alone for eight years and was used to my own rhythms, having a space to withdraw into. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I need to think about it.”

  “You’re afraid of intimacy!” she declared emphatically.

  Was I? Was that it? I decided to see a therapist. In my first session, I told the therapist, Laura, that I wanted help deciding whether or not to live with Dee. I figured four weeks would do it. “Okay,” she nodded, not contesting my absurd claim.

  After three months, I decided: Leap, take a chance on love, but stay in therapy.

  When I told Dee, she said, “Wonderful, I’m so glad!” Then she added, “When we live together, I need to be nonmonogamous.”

  My stomach lurched.

  “I need this,” Dee went on, “because as an incest survivor I need to be free to pursue my own desire and not feel owned by another.”

  I felt ill. She’d started her own therapy. I guess this was what she’d figured out. What could I say to that?

  I went to my mother for sympathy. Kvetching about our lovers continued to be a pastime of ours. This time, though, when I told her my shock at Dee’s declaration, she didn’t start yelling about how rotten Dee was. “You two need help sorting this out,” she said. It was my mother who found us a couples’ therapist.

  Dee and I struggled along in couples’ therapy, at a stalemate. I put living together on hold. In my own therapy I was beginning to understand that over and over I had chosen terribly wounded partners whom I would try to heal with my love, hoping for a miraculous transformation, as if—voilà!—they would become stable and deeply attentive to me. Of course, it never worked, and just left me resentful and martyred. I started to get how linked love and hatred and suffering were for me, embedded from childhood. My new mantra became: I have a choice. I still clung frantically to Dee, but some part of me was gathering strength.

  ONE FALL EVENING, I went over to Dee’s for our Saturday date. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said, as soon as I was in the door. I could feel my chest tightening. I just stared at her, not wanting to hear whatever was coming. “Last night, I was over at Renee’s, and we kissed.”

  Now I had a sharp pain in my chest. “Kissed as friends?” I asked dumbly, hoping I misunderstood.

  “No, we made out. And I want, I need, to be lovers with her. And to be with you. Will you agree to that?”

  My limbs had gone n
umb, and it felt as if I would float off the ground. My throat ached. It was a body state that reminded me of those times after my mother’s attempted suicides. Don’t leave me, no, this isn’t happening. I breathed slowly, summoning myself back. I wasn’t a child. Perhaps I could handle this. I was down to two choices: leave her, or see if I could tolerate nonmonogamy. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t like it, I don’t want it, but I will try it because I’m not ready to end this relationship with you.”

  In couples’ therapy, we tried to make rules to create some sanity. But rules couldn’t keep me from sleepless nights of obsession, rage, and agitation. It was ugly, and I couldn’t bear it. But I did, for a couple months.

  In one therapy session, Laura said to me, “You seem to have a limitless ability for suffering.” The truth of this jolted me. Was that how I wanted to keep living? I began to see that with Dee, abandonment was the same red cape that lover after lover had waved in my face, and I charged at it, despite the spears in my back.

  I started to grasp how profound the abandonments were that I’d suffered as a child, and how I’d learned to abdicate my needs to keep my mother alive. But now my mother was with me, her house and body just feet away. She was finally able to be the grown-up whose steady presence provided a resting ground. And because I was mothered at last, my frantic need for a lover had a counterpoint, a place were I was held. Something tight in me was loosening.

  Two weeks later, Dee called me, crying. Renee had broken up with her. Little cartwheels of joy spun inside me.

  “I need you to support my grieving,” Dee said.

  “I’m sorry you’re hurting,” I answered, “but don’t you have a friend you could call? I don’t think I’m the person for this.” The firmness in my answer surprised even me.

  Not long afterward, we went on a three-day cross-country ski trip. Back in our cabin after a day gliding on snowy trails, I ventured, “So, now that you and Renee have broken up, you’re into being monogamous, right?”

  Dee squinted at me and frowned. “That hasn’t changed anything. I still need to be free.”

  I stared at her bleakly. “I have to go for a walk.” Outside, the snow was blue in the evening light. I stumbled along a trail, now and then crunching through the top crust of snow up to my knees. I didn’t get very far. Instead, I leaned against a pine tree and let loose, my tears an avalanche rumbling down the mountainside of my denial. It’s over, it’s over rang in my head.

  When I returned to the cabin, it didn’t occur to me to say, “I have to go home.” Instead, we skied for two more days. Dee seemed oblivious, taking my silence for acquiescence, while I simmered with silent fury.

  After Dee dropped me off on Clarke Street, I went right over to my mother’s. As soon as Gloria let me in, I told her what had happened, not bothering to sit down. We were standing in her living room, and when I paused, she held out her arms. “Come here, bubbala.” I walked into them, and wept. When there were no more sobs left, she tucked me into bed.

  Three days later, I broke up with Dee in couples’therapy. I needed the formal setting where there was no danger of succumbing to sex, and the third person as witness to ensure I didn’t backslide. In our session, Dee accused me of giving up on her because I couldn’t handle her incest story. “I hope one day you’ll accept me as I am and be lovers again,” she said.

  There was a long pause as I searched for the strength to say, “That’s not going to happen, Dee.”

  The therapist hugged us each farewell.

  When it was my turn, she whispered in my ear, “Good job.”

  Chapter 40. Wilderness

  AS I THUMBED THROUGH the listings in the Bay Times, the local gay rag, I was drawn to a notice for a monthly Jewish lesbian discussion group. It was three months since I’d broken up with Dee; surely I’d ached long enough. Time to reach out and meet new women.

  I joined the group with an ulterior motive: I was on the hunt for a girlfriend. At first, I wasn’t especially attracted to anyone in the group. One meeting, two members announced they’d gotten involved with each other. Lucky them. I’d met Dana, one of the couple, two years previously. She and I had been part of a women’s anti-nuclear protest group Solar Spinsters, sitting in the road with arms linked in civil disobedience at the gates of Lawrence Livermore Labs, developer of nuclear weapons. After that group disbanded, Dana and I lost touch, until one day about a year later, when I saw her across a city street. She was distinctive enough that I recognized her from a distance: short like me, but with a wild mop of long, curly, dark brown hair. Now she had a bright pink streak in her hair. Jeez, I thought, she really is of a different generation. Dana was only seven years younger, but I came from the flannel-shirt age of lesbian fashion. Not one of my other friends had a pink streak.

  At the next Jewish group meeting I announced I was planning to go to a singles social, something I’d never done. “God, I’m nervous. Anyone want to join me?”

  “I’ll go,” Dana said, smiling at me.

  I stared at her. “Huh? I thought you two were together.” It turned out that she and her girlfriend had broken up.

  The mixer was in a private house. Dana and I stood around the living room, paper name tags pasted on our chests, clutching soft drinks and making uneasy small talk with the occasional stranger who wandered by. It was a nightmare. But at some point during that evening, I looked over at Dana, and my mind made one of those shifts from she’s a good buddy to wondering hey, what about Dana?

  SOON AFTERWARD, Dana called. She had a pair of comp tickets to a Berkeley Rep production of Medea, done Kabuki style. Did I want to go? I restrained myself from ululating, from retorting, Is the sky blue?

  The play was primal, tragic, intense. Afterward, we went to a coffeehouse. We talked nonstop, discussing the play, energetically batting ideas back and forth. I hadn’t clicked like this with someone since I didn’t know when—forever? After several hours and lots of herbal tea, I drove her home. Pulling into her driveway, I was faced with the dilemma of lesbian outings: Was this a date or just two female friends going out? It wasn’t clear to me what Dana had in mind, but I was vibrating with excitement. I turned off the engine. Glancing at her sideways, I blurted, “I feel just like a teenager!” I reached over to put my hand on her leg, but it landed on empty air. She had opened the door and was sliding out lickety-split. Or was it like a bat out of hell?

  “Good night,” I heard her say, amid my humiliation.

  “Good night,” I managed to choke out, my face aflame. And then she was gone.

  A few weeks later, our Jewish group planned a weekend camping trip at the Russian River. As it turned out, Dana and I were the only ones free on Friday night, so we drove up together. The rest were arriving on Saturday.

  The campsite was right next to the river, flowing a muddy green. The July day had been hot, so even though Dana and I arrived in the evening, we were sweaty and up for a swim. We stripped off our clothes and flung them on a nearby picnic table. I held back for a minute, and watched Dana walk down to the water and stand at the shoreline, dipping her feet in. God, she was curvaceous, luscious. I joined her, and we swam in the darkening waters to the sound of crickets and bullfrogs. After our swim, we decided to sleep outside, so we simply set our pads out and plopped our sleeping bags on top. We wiggled into our bags. “Good night,” Dana said, and turned away from me.

  What torture. I wanted her, but clearly that wasn’t happening. I slept badly. The gang arrived the next day, relieving me of the possibility of making a bumbling move. That evening, as we all sat around the crackling campfire, Dana told the group that she loved to backpack but had no one to go with.

  “I’ll go with you,” I offered, trying to sound nonchalant.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Dana and I pulled into the parking area at the Carson Pass trailhead at nine thousand feet in the Sierras, the entrance point for the Mokelumne Wilderness. We helped each other hoist on our backpacks and started up the steep incline.

  Just before
sunset, we arrived at the lake. There were granite peaks all around us, their mica flakes catching the last light and glowing golden, melting snow forming rivulets down their sides. We set up camp next to a pine tree, and, after a cold dinner of cheese, crackers, and dried fruit, tied a rope around a small rock. The plan was to throw this over a tree limb and attach our food sack to it to keep it away from the bears.

  Dana tried to throw, and then I did. Pathetic, girlie throws, nowhere near making it over the limb. We started laughing, light-headed and woozy in the thin air, and a bit hysterical.

  “Oh no, two femmes on a camping trip!” Dana said.

  “Where are those butches when you need them?” I howled. Dee had always had a great pitch. By now, we were doubled over with laughter, clutching our stomachs, tears rolling down our faces.

  We spent the next day lounging naked at the far side of Frog Lake, baking in the sun on the rocky shore, and then racing into the icy water. We’d whoop and come out tingling. My eyes feasted on Dana’s body, her full breasts, the curve of her hips against the backdrop of the mountains.

  In the afternoon, we disassembled camp and loaded our backpacks to hike to another lake. As we hiked, the footpath was surrounded by a riot of wildflowers: blue larkspur, yellow and violet columbine, orange Indian paintbrush, Mariposa lily. Around each bend, there were new vistas of mountain peaks. We paused now and then to gaze into the distance, exclaiming over such beauty.

  For dinner, we made backpacker pesto over pasta. We had carried in a stick of butter, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil, which we melted with garlic, dried basil, and parmesan. We were both ravenous, but we ate slowly, savoring the meal’s intense, explosive flavors. It felt like my taste buds were newly awakened, as if the fresh mountain air had heightened them.